At Enterprise Connect last week, Cisco Jabber and Cisco TelePresence weren’t the only stars of the show. Cisco’s desktop virtualization thin clients, Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC), were getting quite a bit of attention also. Some may find this surprising since Enterprise Connect has traditionally been considered a “voice” show. But just as the market has moved beyond voice to more mobile, social and visual collaboration, it has also evolved to a world of virtual collaboration. With the resulting unexpected benefit of unification of the complete office desktop, which in turn enables a variety of mobile strategies, many companies are now reconsidering their virtual desktop projects as voice and video become a must have for the users.

Last year at Enterprise Connect, we discussed how Cisco is helping customers address the challenges with Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), Cisco’s end to end virtual workspace solution with new desktop virtualization clients. In addition to the VXC 2000 series that were featured on the Exhibition Hall, we offered Cisco NDA sessions on VXI, where we demonstrated a new thin client we were working on, VXC 6215.

Last week, we demoed this new device in the Enterprise Connect Exhibit Hall and got a lot of interest from the conference attendees. The attendees immediately understood the value of VXC 6215, which unifies virtual desktops with voice and video, all in one device, without compromising the user experience. Many of them used the word “smart” to describe how VXC 6215 eliminates the classic “hairpin” issue that is associated with today’s traditional desktop virtualization thin clients when voice and video is not separated from the display protocol. With VXC 6215, we’ve applied the network intelligence to route voice and video traffic, point to point, without traversing back to the data center.

Dateline Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Citrix Summit and Synergy, October 2011
Hi again,
Last post I said I’d get back to you to give you, at least, my opinion of why Citrix and Cisco are partnering up. As you might have seen from the dateline above, it’s easy to find out when you get to Citrix Summit and Synergy. It has to do with the global and ubiquitous Cisco networks deployed by organizations everywhere. Citrix is doing great with XenApp (last I heard, well over 50,000,000 licenses) and is poised to do even better with XenDesktop.

It’s the week before VMworld Copenhagen, and there’s already a lot of buzz around the big VXI news that came out today. If you missed it, you can get access to the web event via the Cisco Collaboration Launch Experience page here. I’ll get back to Copenhagen in a minute, but let’s take a moment to discuss why these announcements have such a significant impact on delivering what we call the next-generation virtual workspace…

Last fall, we introduced VXI, delivering a groundbreaking system-level approach for simplifying and optimizing the delivery of virtual desktops to any end point, leveraging the industry’s fastest growing compute infrastructure purpose-built for large scale, high-performance virtualization, the Cisco Unified Computing System. We also announced our new portfolio of Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC’s) providing new device form factors and capabilities not previously seen in the marketplace, underpinned by an end-to-end validated design that takes the guesswork out of moving from a small pilot to full-scale production.

There’s lots of activity at Cisco right now leading up to Citrix Synergy in San Francisco next week. Our theme for the event is the ongoing collaboration with Citrix on Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI)

Both companies have been busy since last September, when we launched our first desktop virtualization solution with Citrixresulting in high levels of interest from both customers and mutual partners. This Cisco UCS solution delivers one of the most scalable XenDesktop platforms on the market as verified in a recent report published by Principled Technologies and has been chosen as a Citrix Ready Partner Solution of the Year Finalist .

More recently we began shipping our first VXC zero clients with Citrix ICA support. And for the growing number of mobile users that need their desktop and collaboration services with them wherever they go – there is the Cisco Cius business tablet with Citrix Receiver support.

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